I closed my eyes and nestled into my bedroll, praying morning would come soon.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

PAULINE

He died in battle, my mother had told me, much as Mikael had. I had never known my father, but I had always imagined him to be the kind of man who would wrap his arms around me, gently soothe away my troubles, love me without condition, and protect me at any cost. That was how I would describe my baby’s own father to her. But I knew all fathers weren’t like that. Lia’s wasn’t.

The king was a distant man, more monarch than father, but surely his blood wasn’t ice, nor his heart stone. Lia needed help. She’d been gone for weeks now, with no word from Rafe. Though I was sure he cared about her, Rafe and his secretive band of men didn’t inspire my confidence, and with each passing day, my suspicions of them grew. I couldn’t wait any longer. The Viceregent had been sympathetic toward Lia. He was our only hope. Surely he had the king’s ear and could bend it toward forgiveness and then help.

Berdi wouldn’t let me travel alone, and Gwyneth eagerly joined me in my quest. How Berdi would manage the tavern with only Enzo for help I didn’t know, but right now we all agreed that Lia’s safety was most important. Barbarians had her. I feared what they may have done to her already.

And there were the dreams too. For a week now, they had plagued me, fleeting glimpses of Lia riding on a galloping horse, and with each stride, she faded away until she wasn’t there at all. Gone, a misty eidolon, except for her voice, a high, keening cry that cut through the wind.

I knew I risked arrest myself by going back, since I had helped Lia escape, but I had to take the chance. Though I feared the possibility of prison, I was just as afraid of walking the streets of Civica again and seeing the last places where Mikael and I had been together, the place where we had conceived our child together—the child he would never know. It was already dredging up my feelings of loss. His ghost would be present on every street I passed.

The trek on the donkeys was taking far longer than the one Lia and I had made to Terravin on our Ravians, but in my condition, riding fast and hard wasn’t an option anyway. “It’s not much farther,” I told Gwyneth when we stopped to water the donkeys. “Just another two days.”

Gwyneth brushed her thick red locks from her face, and her eyes narrowed, looking down the road still ahead of us. “Yes, I know,” she said absently.

“How would you know? You’ve been to Civica?”

She snapped back to attention, tugging on Dieci’s reins. “Just a guess,” she said. “I think you should let me speak with the Chancellor when we get there. I might have more power of persuasion than you.”

“The Chancellor hates Lia. He’d be the last person to speak to.”

She tilted her head to the side and shrugged. “We’ll see.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

RAFE

“Bite down!” I commanded.

We couldn’t afford for him to scream out, not with the way sound echoed through these rocky hills. I shoved a leather strap between his teeth. Sweat poured down his forehead and dotted his upper lip.

“Hurry,” I said.

Tavish shoved the needle into Sven’s cheek and pulled the bloody gut through the other side of the wound that ran from his cheekbone to his jaw. It was too long and too gaping to leave to a poultice. I held Sven’s arms in case he flinched, but he remained still—only his eyelids fluttered.

We had encountered a patrol of Vendans. The barbarians were becoming bolder and more organized. I had never seen a Vendan patrol numbering more than a handful this far out from the Great River. There were plenty of small rogue bands of three or four, fierce and violent—that was their way—but not an organized and uniformed patrol. It didn’t bode well for any of the kingdoms.

The treacherous Great River had always been our ally. A thin chain drawbridge that could barely support a single horse was their only way across. Were they breeding horses on this side of the river now? The patrol we encountered had fine, well-trained mounts.

We took them all down, but not before Sven suffered the first blow. He was riding ahead of us and was knocked from his horse before I could even draw my sword, but then I moved swiftly, taking down his attacker and three more who followed behind him. In minutes, the Vendans littered the ground at our feet, a dozen in all. Jeb’s face was still spattered in blood, and I could feel the crusted smears on mine.

Orrin brought over Sven’s flask of red-eye as Tavish had ordered. I removed the leather strap clenched between Sven’s teeth and gave him a sip to help numb the pain.

“No,” Tavish said. “It’s for his face—to clean the wound.”

Sven started to protest, and I shoved the strap back into his mouth. He would rather suffer infection that see his precious spirits spilling from his cheek to the ground. Tavish shoved the needle in one last time and closed off the wound. Sven groaned, and when Tavish poured the strong draft over the sewn gash, his whole body shuddered with pain.

He spit the strap out. “Damn you,” he said weakly.

“You’re welcome,” Tavish answered.

We were two miles from the Great River on the only path that led into the Vendan kingdom. We’d been hunkered down in a rocky encampment that faced west, the direction we knew they’d be coming from. It was at a juncture above the route where they’d have to pass, but we’d been here for two days now with no sign of them. They couldn’t have beaten us here. We had ridden until both we and our horses were at the point of collapse. Today we only left our position to scout out a better vantage point farther from the border, but we ran into the patrol. After throwing their bodies into a ravine, we took their horses with us and hoped they weren’t expected to return anytime soon.